MOSS 2007 Beta Experience

I've been wanting to post about my experience in implementing and deploying MOSS 2007 Beta. This wasn't the easiest of things to do really. Today, that implementation has gone out as successfuly case study and we're looking into deploying MOSS 2007 for production in the near future.

10 of the valuable things I've learnt while implementing MOSS 2007 software in the beta stage and this could be quite a standard thing with most beta products (Microsoft Office 14?):

1. We definately need to set the users expectations right and let them know of the risks that are involved in deploying and implementing a beta software.
2. It's a learning curve for all parties involved and time spent on certain things which would normally take less time could take more than expected.
3. The users will need to identify certain areas they are keen to explore and try to focus on a particular area so that there is value at the end of the implementation.
4. I believe it's not so much a best practice or optimizing performance but trying to get a certain concept or idea correct at this stage.
5. Very important is to foster a close relationship with the client and keeping them updated on what's going on even of the bugs and faults the software is causing. Some of them love seeing this!
6. Keeping up to date with the beta newsgroups, blogs and other sources of information do help.
7. Lots and lots of testing and finding alternative ways and methods to achieve the same end result!
8. Using the software in it's beta stage for some aspect of the project (used it as repository for project documents) helped the users get familiar and helped the team learn! Of course we also kept the documents in some other repository just in case.
9. We musn't be afraid to break the software as it's in it's beta stage and we need to discover the "breakability" of it so that we can;
10. Report bugs!

Those were some of things I've learnt and I believe the most annoying thing was when the software wasn't behaving as it was suppose to it was always a matter of... "was the software mucking up because it's in beta or was I mucking up that the software wasn't doing what it was suppose to..."

It was a good experience at the end of the day!